Here at Chronicles, we used to take very seriously a motto taken from the Psalmist, “Put not your faith in princes.” This meant to us that, given the tendency of power to corrupt, one couldn’t necessarily rely on leaders to do the right thing. Where then could we put our faith? Some places are obvious—in God, of course, in our friends, and in our family. But today the victory of Donald Trump gives us reason to think that we can put our faith in our fellow citizens, and quite possibly in our country, the United States of America.

A vote for Kamala Harris was a vote for an empty vessel, a disappointing puppet who had proven herself unable to keep even members of her own vice presidential staff happy, let alone voters. She was a candidate with no significant track record of leadership who espoused policy positions that changed, like her accent, with her audiences and with the instructions of her handlers and pollsters. Her replacement of Joe Biden on account of his apparent senility was not only the least democratic selection of a presidential candidate imaginable but was made by persons still unknown. Harris, quite possibly for years, never revealed that the country was being run by some sort of cabal, perhaps reporting to unknown former officials (Barack Obama?) who might have the ultimate responsibility for the open borders and other failed policies of the purported Biden-Harris administration.

All of this was a scandal far worse than Watergate, but sadder even than this misconduct was the fact that at least since the election of Barack Obama, our mainstream media has lost interest in pursuing the obvious signs of Democrat chicanery and corruption and has uncritically accepted the fantasies that led to the impeachments, the lawfare, and the myriad other forms of neutralizing Donald Trump and his followers. Now, perhaps, we can move on.

The election results—Trump’s apparently undeniable victory, the recovery of the Senate by the GOP and the possible maintaining of the majority of the House—are features of the greatest political comeback in history. Harold Ford, Jr., Fox News’s loveable Democrat, was correct when he called Trump the greatest political artist of his lifetime. For only the second time in American political history a president has been elected to nonconsecutive terms. Despite a one-party legacy media, the American people (aided by the internet, a handful of honest publications such as this one, and most of all, due to the authenticity, audacity, and showmanship of Donald Trump) were able to see and understand how one party did indeed seek to condescend and deceive, while the other offered a return to an earlier, nobler set of ideals.

Obama’s two terms and Biden-Harris’s one threatened to upend the Constitution itself, as abusive power was consolidated in Washington—as regulation, taxes, and inflation rose, and as shadowy figures seemed prepared to put us on the path to Fabian socialism,

Politicians prevaricate and bloviate, and invariably disappoint, but a very few end up as statesman. If Trump manages to keep his promises to close the border, reduces taxes and regulation, begins the dismantling of the administrative state, and puts an end to the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, that’s what he will be.

God, it is said, protects children, fools, and the United States of America. Donald Trump now understands that he is the beneficiary of Providential protection. The Democrats somehow put forward a politician nearly utterly bereft of talent, but with the legacy media’s mischaracterizations about Trump she seemed, until the wee hours of the morning of Nov. 6, to have a path to win.

Trump may well do much to bring this country back to the greatness it once had, but unlike his opponent whose airy inability was wrongly labelled “joy,” Donald Trump has made politics fun again. The earthy genius of appearing in a “Trump-Vance” garbage truck after Biden had disparaged his supporters as refuse, and the stint as a McDonald’s fry cook and drive-thru attendant (to emphasize the fact that Harris was probably lying about having ever worked at the all-American Trump favorite eatery) were moves of sheer delight.

From my perch as legal affairs editor at Chronicles, Trump’s apparent victory is especially sweet because he is again poised to appoint judges (and perhaps justices) who will follow in the steps of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and interpret the laws and Constitution according to their original understanding. His victory makes possible a recovery of the rule of law itself. This alone put me in his corner, but because the rule of law based on morality and religion is the cornerstone of our society. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to suggest Trump may have taken great strides toward preserving Western civilization as we have known it.